From tomorrow onwards, patients with suspected Covid-19 symptoms and suffering from severe acute respiratory infection (SARI), and influenza-like-illness (ILI) in Siliguri will be treated in a private health facility that the state government has taken over.
Following swab tests, if any patient is found positive in the Medica North Bengal Clinic at Pradhan Nagar, he/she will be taken to Dr Chang’s hospital at Matigara for further treatment. The nursing home at Matigara has been chosen for the treatment of Covid-19 patients in north Bengal.
“Covid-19 patients and suspected cases will not be treated at the North Bengal Medical College and Hospital (NBMCH) from now onwards,” a doctor and member of a task force set up by the state government on Covid-19, Prof Abhijit Chowdhury, said after a high-level meeting he held to review the situation of Darjeeling and Jalpaiguri districts at Uttarkanya here today.
However, no representative from Kalimpong district, where the first Covid patient in the region was detected, was present in the meting. Earlier, Prof Chowdhury held a meeting at the NBMCH with officials there.
“A committee of doctors has been constituted at the NBMCH, and if symptomatic patients go there, the panel will decide whether they should be sent to the private health facility taken over by the state government. The facility will treat patients who are suffering from SARI and ILI before Covid-19 tests are done. The facility has been arranged for Siliguri as a first station and will be functional from tomorrow. “Throat swabs will be sent to the NBMCH for tests. If found positive, patients will then be taken to the Covid-19 hospital, and if the tests come negative, the patients will be sent to where they were referred from,” Prof Chowdhury said.
Health department sources said the decision was taken to ease treatment facilities. The bed strength of the proposed centre for suspected patients will be around 140. At Uttarkanya, the meeting was held in the presence of the divisional commissioner of Jalpaiguri, Ajit Ranjan Bardhan, district magistrates, chief medical officers of health, other administrative and health department officers of Darjeeling and Kalimpong, Patient Welfare Committee chairman Dr Rudranath Bhattacharya, NBMCH authorities, doctors and representatives of the Indian Medical Association.
“We reviewed the situation of Darjeeling and Jalpaiguri districts and decided to expedite efforts to ready further infrastructure to combat Covid-19,” the Kolkata-based hepatologist further said. North Bengal has already recorded a death due to Covid19, though the death of another person from Siliguri of suspected Covid-19 has not been confirmed by the health department. Prof Chowdhury was accompanied by Dr Gopal Krishna Dhali, sent by the state government to get firsthand experience of the situation.
Dr Dhali will be staying in north Bengal for two weeks to maintain coordination in the region. Prof Chowdhury, who is also a member of the state government’s Global Advisory Board for Covid Response Policy headed by Nobel laureate Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee, said that the state government had focused on north Bengal and arranged for infrastructure in the health sector to combat Covid-19. He said it was a wrong notion that Covid-19 patients could not be treated without ventilators.
“Sixty Covid-19 hospitals have been set up across the state, and the government has sent four ventilators for each hospital, two dialysis machines, pulse oximeters and other equipment,” he added.Prof Chowdhury, however, cautioned that bringing the situation under full control might take some more months.
Asked about the allegations and protest of health care providers at the Covid-19 hospital in Siliguri, over treatment of patients, Prof Chowdhury said he will talk to them in an effort to dispel their fears. Sources, meanwhile, said that six persons were presently admitted in the NBMCH isolation ward and that two of them have tested negative, while reports of the four others were awaited. Technician on home quarantine: A technician of the Respiratory Intensive Care Unit at the NBMCH was sent into ‘home quarantine’ today, sources said.